maniacbastard:When you make a magnetic shield around your vehicle and if you use a dipole magnet the particles of interest accelerate towards the poles.

Couldn't you just place some physical shielding around the poles of the dipole to serve as "rat traps" for the particles being funneled through the field lines? Surely that'd be lighter than wrapping the whole vehicle in shielding.

Cthulhu_is_my_homeboy:maniacbastard: When you make a magnetic shield around your vehicle and if you use a dipole magnet the particles of interest accelerate towards the poles.

Couldn't you just place some physical shielding around the poles of the dipole to serve as "rat traps" for the particles being funneled through the field lines? Surely that'd be lighter than wrapping the whole vehicle in shielding.

Recent evidence from NASA's Curiosity rover mission to the Red Planet has revealed that astronauts on the round-trip would be exposed to high levels of radiation from cosmic rays and high-energy particles

Recent? Haven't we known about this for a long time?

DarthBart:Cthulhu_is_my_homeboy: maniacbastard: When you make a magnetic shield around your vehicle and if you use a dipole magnet the particles of interest accelerate towards the poles.

Couldn't you just place some physical shielding around the poles of the dipole to serve as "rat traps" for the particles being funneled through the field lines? Surely that'd be lighter than wrapping the whole vehicle in shielding.

DarthBart:Cthulhu_is_my_homeboy: maniacbastard: When you make a magnetic shield around your vehicle and if you use a dipole magnet the particles of interest accelerate towards the poles.

Couldn't you just place some physical shielding around the poles of the dipole to serve as "rat traps" for the particles being funneled through the field lines? Surely that'd be lighter than wrapping the whole vehicle in shielding.

Which could be the way to go. Sci-fi has the idea, we just need to tweak the execution a bit. I find it an amusing concept to have a spacecraft surrounded by its gaggle of shield-drones. Might never happen, but I'll admit, i'd be cool to say you're part of the "deflector shield project".

Carth:buntz: See, what sucks about this, and most people don't consider it when watching Star Trek is they're basically the military, flying around in space in these ships.

For average nobodies down on Earth, it's business as usual.

They could be up there right now going warp speed with cloaking devices and wave motion guns, chances are I'd never see the inside of one!

People down on Earth work doing what they love in a society without any money. Seems like a better life than flying around in space until you get blown up or die on an away mission.

I imagine the challenges and dangers of space travel would appeal to some as opposed to being trapped on a planet where your existence leaves nothing to chance, success is guaranteed or at least there are no real consequences to failure just as the actual rewards for success would be somewhat limited. I can see how such a society would eventually stagnate and die off.

buntz:Carth: People down on Earth work doing what they love in a society without any money. Seems like a better life than flying around in space until you get blown up or die on an away mission.

The world still needs ditch diggers

There was no end of crappy jobs in Star Trek. It always made me wonder -- who got to decide who lived the horrible lives of drudgery and who lived the awesome lives? This was a society with amazingly extreme poverty, the kind of which is vastly worse than anything we see in the US, on the order of the lawless areas of Somalia and you have extreme wealth. It's an odd, odd place.

Not to get all geeky, but isn't this more akin to the Enterprise's "navigational shields" produced by the main deflector array? I mean, the Enterprise didn't have a hull that was meters thick. Hell, some of the windows looked like they weren't even there.

imashark:Not to get all geeky, but isn't this more akin to the Enterprise's "navigational shields" produced by the main deflector array? I mean, the Enterprise didn't have a hull that was meters thick. Hell, some of the windows looked like they weren't even there.

Yeah, I was going to say; this is more like the deflector than actual shields. At high speeds, even a stray hydrogen atom could do serious damage to a starship, and deflectors are designed to sweep these particles out of the way. They're useless for anything bigger than a few molecules across, and so they're not the sort of thing one would want to depend on in a fight. But for just getting around, they get the job done.

Hand to God, when they were accepting volunteers for Mars, I asked my wife if we should sign up. She said she was in, except for the cosmic radiation aspect. I replied "Oh, no, it's cool, we'll just get superpowers. That's how it works. Itsch schiensche."

Which could be the way to go. Sci-fi has the idea, we just need to tweak the execution a bit. I find it an amusing concept to have a spacecraft surrounded by its gaggle of shield-drones. Might never happen, but I'll admit, i'd be cool to say you're part of the "deflector shield project".